The latest major release of Drupal 7.0 feels like a long-time coming. I was not one of those followers that was overly optimistic thinking it would have been released in 2009... they were crazy to think that. The overall changes seem well made and a natural progression of the Drupal platform. Since version 5.0 each release has been not just a cool update but something more of literal stepping stones where going back seemed archaic. The changes in Drupal 7.0 will help new users and old.

I was invited for the third year in a row to present at the large Adobe MAX conference this October. It will be taking place in Los Angeles again, which works out great for me. Instead of a regular speaking session I will be instructing two hands-on labs, both about building Drupal themes (basics and advanced theme production).

My new Drupal related project, an add-on for Drush called "Drush Cleanup" is now online. It helps developers by cleaning out all the text files that are not needed when running a Drupal site (like README.txt). The project files and details are available at: http://drupal.org/project/drush_cleanup

The game is changing again. Microsoft who originally was supporting Drupal by promoting it is now funding Drupal development. Their contribution to Drupal 7 will be a native Microsoft SQL Server driver was announced at DrupalCon 2010 in San Francisco. This will let customers have a Microsoft alternative to MySQL or Postgre. I applaud this initiative.

I am co-speaking at SXSW 2010 in Austin, Texas this March. My co-presenter is Scott Fegette from Adobe; he is an Adobe Dreamweaver Product Manager or something like that. He's awesome and I was invited to join him to push forward the message that the web design and development landscape has changed and Drupal is in the front of that change. I will be presenting on designer challenges.

I am taking a year off. Not really. This year for DrupalCon I am assisting as a track chair for the beginners track and out of choice I am not presenting any sessions. I have presented at a lot of conferences and camps and I felt this year I'll relax and try to enjoy the conference itself more.

I am now a Lynda.com author. My first video title "Drupal: Creating and Editing Custom Themes" is out now and is an online exclusive. The course teaches the basics of Drupal themes - what they are, how to control them, and how to build your own theme from scratch. The course is a little over 4 hours long, so you should be able to complete the course in a day or less.

This is a big one. Microsoft is now supporting Drupal (and Wordpress, no Joomla it seems). They offer PHP web app downloads to promote the fact that Windows Server now ships with PHP support, certified by Microsoft and Zend. Drupal is at the top of the lists. This is big.

I manage the Los Angeles Drupal user group and each year we throw a free DrupalCamp in or near Los Angeles. One of our key sponsors this year is Microsoft and they were great about it and ended saying a lot at the camp about their support for PHP & Drupal.

The Los Angeles Drupal User Group will be holding our second annual DrupalCamp event at the Los Angeles Convention Center. This is a big deal for us as a user group, but also as important for Drupal. Companies and freelancers will be attending this event and will hopefully get a sense of how serious the Drupal platform is.

I'm glad to see the release of Drupal 6. If you haven't heard of Drupal it is a free, open source content management system (CMS) written in PHP. One minor downfall of this release is the backwards compatibility of PHP so it is written to support PHP4 but that doesn't mean your modules could not make PHP5 a requirement to run.

Drupal 5 has thousands of web sites running, and Drupal 4.x has probably even more legacy sites still floating around. I'm sure Drupal 6 will take over as soon as more modules are available for it.